John Mclear is a seasoned inventor and hands-on software engineer with 15 years of experience building full-stack web apps, embedded systems, and open-source collaboration tools. As founder and former CTO of McLEAR he led the creation of the NFC Ring and guided its technical direction, while earlier roles include managing director and long-term stewardship of Etherpad Lite as a committee member and contributor. His technical breadth spans CAD and Arduino through Node.js, Socket.IO, PHP, and system administration (Postfix, Spamassassin, Varnish, Nagios), reflecting a maker’s mentality that blends hardware, firmware, and server-side engineering. He has contributed meaningful front-end and back-end fixes to widely used projects like Etherpad and real-time collaborative drawing tools, and most of his work has been donated to open-source communities. Based in Bradford, UK, he’s known for turning practical inventions into shareable tools and for stepping back from public activity while leaving enduring community value.
Etherpad: A modern really-real-time collaborative document editor.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:10 releases, 131 reviews, 3002 commits in 10 years 9 months
Contributions summary:John contributed to various aspects of the Etherpad-lite project, focusing on features related to chat messages and the user interface. The commits included changes to display new chat messages, modification of the chat window, and the addition of a function for the focus on the chat input. Further commits involved updating the timeslider, including logic to update on certain message types.
A real time collaborative drawing tool using nodejs, socket.io & paper.js
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:10 commits in 1 day
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on front-end development, making updates to the UI and integrating socket.io for real-time functionality. They modified the `index.jade` file to adjust the layout and add UI elements. They also addressed compatibility issues with the latest versions of socket.io and express.js, ensuring the application's core features functioned correctly.
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